Twelve years ago, amid dwindling revenues and lackluster attendance, Major League Soccer dissolved its two troubled Florida teams, the Tampa Bay Mutiny and the Miami Fusion.

Now Orlando is on the cusp of becoming the only MLS team in the Southeast. Orlando and Orange County last week agreed to fund a new $84 million soccer stadium downtown. And the owners of the minor-league Orlando City Soccer Club will invest a reported $100 million to be the league's latest expansion franchise — the only one in the Sunshine State.

So what changed?

Put simply, statistics show professional soccer's fan base has grown up, and that's helped raise awareness of the sport in a country infatuated with football and basketball.

"If you are 40 and above, you don't get this. If you are below 40, you get it," Orlando City Lions President Phil Rawlins said. "There really is a generational thing here. This is the sport of the future. It's the sport of the next generation. They're already into it."

Rawlins is banking on people such as Natalia Paredes and Ryan Hodges.

The couple, both 29, are loyal Orlando City Soccer fans who decided to stay in Central Florida when a recent opportunity to move came up, in part because of their love of the team and the fans they've met.

"Orlando is a brand-new community with people moving into it from all around the country, and from outside the country," said Paredes, who came here 10 years ago from Ecuador. "Until this team came around, I never really felt that sense of community."

In the United States, football, basketball and baseball still dominate. But the ESPN Sports Poll found that in 2011, soccer was the second-most-popular professional sport in the U.S. — behind the NFL — in a key demographic: those ages 12-24. It was first among Hispanics.

One reason is the obvious one: Kids who played in youth leagues are now adults.

But there's also a greater awareness of professional soccer in America. Twenty years ago, it was tough to find even major international games on television here, outside of pubs that catered to an international clientele.

Now cable subscribers here can watch more English Premier League games than are available to viewers in England.

Edju Ewasko is a health administrator who said his 6-year-old son can watch the sport and connect with certain players in ways that he couldn't growing up.

"You could never watch it on TV," said Ewasko, 41. "You couldn't see those guys play. But my son can see that stuff."

Even less obvious is the real-world impact of the FIFA video-game series produced by Maitland-based EA Sports. Among the best-selling video games in the world, it allows players to pit real-life teams and players against one another, building awareness of brands and soccer stars.

"Young adults are a big driver of this sport at this point," MLS President Mark Abbott said. "So you have people who are in their mid-20s who grew up with this sport, either they played it or could watch it on television."

MLS was founded in 1993 and played its first season in 1996. It was reported to have lost $250 million during the next five years, and that's when the league contracted, jettisoning its Miami and Tampa teams.

But the league has been on a growth spurt. There were 10 MLS teams after the two in Florida were dissolved; there are now 19. A 20th, the New York City Football Club, was announced in May and will begin play in 2015.

The league seems to be on more stable financial footing. The 10 clubs of a decade ago had just three owners. Now every MLS team has its own ownership group.

The new insistence that teams play in soccer-specific stadiums also has made clubs more profitable. The city and county are helping fund a new stadium on Church Street, a block west of the Amway Center, because it was a prerequisite of earning an MLS franchise.

"That was an entirely different era," Abbott said of the failed Florida franchises. "That was over a decade ago. Both the country and the league have changed significantly over that time."

MLS spokesman Dan Courtemanche said the Orlando Lions have proved the City Beautiful is fertile ground for the Beautiful Game.

The Lions have won the USL Pro Championship two of the three seasons they have played in Orlando. The team led the league in attendance in 2013 and set a record for announced attendance with 20,886 for the championship at the Florida Citrus Bowl in September.

"When they drew 21,000 fans for the USL Pro Championship game, that really woke up not just us in the MLS, but it really woke up the world of soccer," Courtemanche said.

Rawlins said the team will build on its existing fan base after a move to MLS. Rawlins and Brazilian businessman Flávio Augusto da Silva, who invested in the team in February, plan to bring one or two Brazilian stars to the team. They've already started a marketing effort to bring the Orlando area's already large number of Brazilian tourists to Lions matches.

"Our goal is to build a truly global soccer brand. I believe in less than 10 years we will be counted as one of the more significant brands in the world of soccer, not just in the U.S.," Rawlins said. "That's because we have this opportunity of 57 million visitors annually to Orlando."

Charles Tolman, a 30-year-old University of Central Florida grad student, never considered himself a soccer fan, but after going to a few Lions games, he was hooked.

"We're getting a team because of the fans," Tolman said as he donned a purple-and-red outfit and mask, the team's signature colors. "I feel ownership in this. This is grass roots."

A burst of thunderstorm activity across the Chicago-area in mid-afternoon Sunday resulted in multiple injuries and a death at an event in west suburban Wood Dale, the collapse of a dome in northwest suburban Rosemont and the temporary evacuation of the music festival Lollapalooza in Grant Park...

Now there are two: Zimbabwe accused a Pennsylvania doctor on Sunday of illegally killing a lion in April, adding to the outcry over a Minnesota dentist the African government wants to extradite for killing a well-known lion named Cecil in early July.